AMD 7950 Refurb issues

[cereal3]

Hi, a while back I purchased a MSI 7950 refurbished card in the sale, it worked fine for a month or so, then suddenly the system flat out refused to boot or even power on with the card in. Sent it back to OCUK who then sent it to MSI for repair, now I have it back an I'm experiencing some issues again.

I did not modify any drivers while it was sent for repair, and I was using an old 7750 in the meantime, which worked fine. Now placing the 7950 back into the PC, it crashed on the login screen with a TDR error. I assumed it was an error with drivers so I removed them using the 7750 to load windows.

The 7950 will boot with no drivers installed (using the default windows driver @1080 64hz) but if I try to install the latest drivers or older versions, the screen gets tiled/checkerboard patterns briefly then windows crashes again. I used an AMD driver removal tool to clean all the older drivers off the system before I installed the new ones.

Could anyone advise me if I'm missing something obvious as a fix or is the card busted and needing to be sent off again?

Nothing about the system has changed in the time that the card has been away, the power supply meets spec and worked fine before when I first bought the card. I have reinstalled the 7750 and drivers and it works fine.

 

[fs123]

Tiled patterns could mean overheating or VRAM fault. You could try taking heasink off and applying new thermal paste. VRAM fault could mean bad solder joint under one of the chips but to fix that you would need to relow each chip with a heatgun.

First try the card in another pc to rule out psu/motherboard issues.

edit: If it is under warranty then send card back instead of taking heatsink off and voiding warranty. Try getting a refund if possible since it's had problems since day one.